This is essay is divided into three parts. Part two will post on Wednesday, and part three on Friday. While many critics have noted the influence of blues and jazz on Langston Hughes’s poetry, little has been written about Hughes from a sound studies standpoint. His sonic landscapes not only chronicle Harlem from the 1920s [...]

PEACE BY GILLIAN CONOLEY OMNIDAWN, 2014 978-1890650957 Gillian Conoley’s new book of poetry (Omnidawn, 2014) is appropriately entitled Peace because it seems to aim at a kind of reconciliation: with the self, with family, with lovers, with the digital world, and with larger abstractions such as death and the occasional “God” or Christ which she [...]

Body, Out (From Voicemail Poems) There is a freshly-made bed next to mine, that I don’t touch. There is a hum in the room, a hymn in the sky. That evening two animal gods stood mountaintop, and I sat below in the sunset, my body rooted, theirs extended, all precision and color; hoof on mountaintop, [...]

Pool: 5 Choruses By Endi Bogue Hartigan Omnidawn, 2014 ISBN 978-1890650926 It troubles me when readers and writers of poetry insist that “postmodernist” poetry doesn’t make any sense, inherits no concept of consequence, and ultimately leaves all sense of meaning uncertain and equivocated. The fact is that good postmodernist poetry simply succeeds at depicting certain [...]

the birthbone’s connected to the deathbone I am setting a place for each person I love, so they will be comfortable when they set down and start to talk. The morning comes, the morning lates. The lake around which people gather claps its light applause. The people who I love are growing infections. They florally [...]

AND SO IT IS BECAUSE OF THE LICHEN Gathering the facts like so many bones. They make a good tool for telling you I am in love. With the flint, I tear one open, climb in, and speak: hold me close like a crucifix above the river. I cannot cross it the way I would my heart. […]

INTRO: In what we hope will be a regular feature, THEthe Poetry will be showcasing presses–of all backgrounds, ambitions, and oeuvres. Each feature will include some questions about the press and a sampler of the published work. The first featured press is Called Back Books. —a new press run out of Oakland, CA and crafted [...]